> I really wish a Apple or another major OEM would integrate CO2 monitor into watches or smartphones

CO2 levels are locally elevated in the area where you exhale. Someone sitting at a desk with their hands on a keyboard exhaling through their nose would be producing a directed stream of elevated CO2 straight at the sensor on their wrist. Same thing if someone puts their phone on their desk.

Even with the IKEA and other cheap sensors that are becoming popular, there is a learning curve where users discover that putting it on their desk right in front of where they’re breathing produces higher numbers than having it even 5 feet away.

The false positives from having a CO2 sensor that close to everyone’s face would be causing unnecessary alarm all over.

> There are so many rooms, classrooms, movie theaters and other places with poor ventilation where you just feel dizzy, or fall asleep, not knowing it was just due to lower oxygen levels in your blood. Raising awareness is the only real solution.

If someone is falling asleep in this many different places I would suspect undiagnosed sleep apnea or another condition first and foremost. Spaces like movie theaters have very high volumes of air due to their size and commercial building HVAC has much higher standards for air circulation than even your home. If someone was falling asleep in so many different places then the most likely common theme is that person and it should be checked out!

This is another reason why putting CO2 sensors on everyone’s wrists would be a mistake: It would start getting blamed for every vague condition people experience. This has already happened with wrist-worn heart rate monitors. My friends in the medical field see people all the time who come in with vague complaints and they’ve self diagnosed as being related to their heart because they can see their heart rate now.

You also have the wrong idea about what elevated CO2 does. It doesn’t reduce the oxygen levels in your blood. It makes it more difficult for your body to expel CO2, which can produce subtle changes in many processes.

> There are so many rooms, classrooms, movie theaters and other places with poor ventilation where you just feel dizzy, or fall asleep, not knowing it was just due to lower oxygen levels in your blood. Raising awareness is the only real solution.

Not wrong, but it is perhaps worth noting that there are already standards for proper ventilation. Generally you're looking at 5–10 cfm/person (2.5-5 L/s), depending on the facility and purpose of the room; see Table 6.2.2.1 in ASHRAE Standard 62.1 for the US:

* https://www.ashrae.org/file%20library/technical%20resources/...

Maybe set up a monitor, but if the room/facility has recently been renovated and meets modern (>2013) building codes, this 'should' have already been taken into account.

I think the issue is that the common tech requires sensors in an air-chamber. E.g. NDIR works by firing IR at a frequency that is absorbed by CO2. A sensor on the other side either measures the amount of IR light that got through (optical NDIR) or pressure/sound waves (photoacoustic NDIR). I guess that it's hard to use any existing sensors, because they are relatively large and probably water could easily get into the chamber.

Would be extremely cool if Apple, Samsung, and others can crack this, though I think they'd have done it already if it was easy.

I always come at this angle.

If you had the data, what would you do to change it? Would you recommend everyone go outside? You can do that without the data.

Would you wear your own oxygenated supply of air? You can do that without the data.

Would you make recommendations that the office should improve air quality? You can do that without personalized real-time data.

I'm not against data in general, but the idea that if only we had data we would make changes in our lifestyle is not valid. We see it all around us.

We had bathroom scales for over a century, but the data or insights didn't put a dent in the obesity epidemic.

You're right about "the problem will solve itself", but it isn't the data that will help to solve the problem, it's creating a simple and obvious solution.

A friend has a start-up in the commercial air quality space which solves for this problem (in some ways). But the benefit isn't the air quality, it's the cost of maintaining the healthy levels required in commercial buildings. Air quality is the secondary benefit of reduced electricity demand in air circulation.

I guess the problem is with the price of the sensors. Just look how expensive the Aranet 4 home shown in article is. There are worse devices for less like the IKEA alpstuga. I also don’t know how much electricity they pull.

Is it a tually lower oxygen in the blood that's the problem, or higher co2? I'm not sure if having high co2 automatically implies lower oxygen, I have no idea at all but feels like it may not necessarily be strictly. Linked. Also, are the cognitive issues of low oxygen the same as high co2 or do they produce different effects?

This sounds like a solution in search of a problem. If you feel dizzy at random moments, see a doctor soon.

I built a conference badge with a proper, laser-based CO2 sensor.

It didn't work very well because just by virtue of being near me all the time, it didn't get a very good measure of the average room contents.

There is one in the EcoBee Premium and we use it to automatically drive our HRV (heat recovery ventilation.).

It is better to have it in the HVAC system than in your phone anyhow:

https://ben3d.ca/blog/upgrading-hvac-control

> Raising awareness is the only real solution.

You'd have to raise awareness on every single person in the room and them sustain pressure to the organization in order to have proper CO2 levels in the room/organization.

And then you have to align every other person on every other organization to do this as well and hope for the best.

Or, you can do the right thing and have the state introduce regulations

I was looking at CO2 sensor module boards this week and the sensors themselves are quite large and the floor price is $15ish.

This would probably be the biggest awareness thing tech could do for climate change as well.

CO2 and all other air quality indexers have to be very carefully calibrated regularly. It's not some slop you can just throw into a consoomer cheap iot device.

Article author completely ignores this for the obvious reasons.

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Apple watches already have a blood-oxygen sensor so it's covered, albeit indirectly.